Gore seeks 100% green energy

By Fiona Harvey in London
Published: July 18 2008 01:34

The US should aim to generate all of its electricity from zero-carbon energy sources within a decade, Al Gore, the former vice-president, urged on Thursday.
In a speech in Washington he argued that only by making such a commitment could the US solve the pressing problems of the high oil price, the export of jobs abroad and climate change.

“Our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges – the economic, environmental and national security crises,” Mr Gore said. “We are borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change.”
Mr Gore called on the candidates in the presidential race this autumn to take up the green energy challenge: “I for one do not believe our country can withstand 10 more years of the status quo.”
Comparing such a commitment to President John F Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon, Mr Gore insisted that generating all of America’s electricity from renewables was achievable. The cost of power from renewable sources, such as the sun and wind, had been rapidly reduced in recent years, and the high price of fossil fuels made such energy sources more competitive with conventionally produced electricity.
The US would have to keep its existing nuclear and hydroelectric plants to meet the target. Mr Gore is an investor in renewable energy technologies, through his chairmanship of Generation Investment Management, a fund management company managed by David Blood, former head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
Since last year, he has also been a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, the Silicon Valley venture capital fund, which is seeking to make sizeable investments in renewable energy companies.
Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, an environmental group, said: “We need to change the debate in this country from what we can’t do to what we can. America has led every major technological shift in the last 100 years, and we can lead the next one as well. The problem is not technology, it is political will.”
But critics pointed out that US citizens worried about high oil prices and the credit crunch might be less receptive to Mr Gore’s message.
Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington thinktank, said: “Mr Gore has moved a long way from the solutions recommended in An Inconvenient Truth: replace your light bulbs with compact fluorescents, buy a hybrid car, and telecommute from home.
“We couldn’t come close to [his] goal of producing all our electricity from solar, wind, and geothermal energy in 10 years without coercive, even authoritarian government.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008